“A crack in the wall, if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. Size determines an object, but scale determines art.” Robert Smithson

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I’m fascinated by the sun-shaped lamp, called Little Sun, designed by Olafur Eliasson, together with the engineer Frederik Ottesen. Eliasson was born in Iceland, a country where, during the winter, you cannot see any sunlight. That’s why he gives extreme importance to light in his works. Certainly everybody remember The Weather Project, realized at the Tate Modern, London, in 2003, where he installed a giant semi-circular object made up from hundreds of mono-frequency lamps, in order to recreate an artificial sun in the Turbine Hall of the museum. This new project is also about sunlight, but, this time, the small piece of art wants to be part of our everyday life, as the real sun. Little Sun is a solar-powered lamp, conceived to bring light to those countries were electricity is not accessible to everyone. As stated in their project web page: “Little Sun helps decentralize access to power in the world by making sustainable light available anywhere. It promotes economic growth in regions of the world where electricity is not available or reliable.”

On the other hand, I would like to show another kind of project: an intervention realized in Berlin, which concept lies on the opposite pole of Little Sun. Powerhouse 2 The People is a project conceived by the creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse. What they did was give citizens the chance to take care of a small piece of their urban furniture, installing a switch on a streetlamp and letting people free to turn it on or off as they wanted, when they wanted. We’re used to have light in our life and often we don’t give value to it, sometimes we also waste it without even realizing it. This project faces the problem of sustainable energy-consumption, hacking the frame of the city, involving citizens and encouraging them to think about how their everyday life works. A small effort for a great effective result.